On being the change you want to see in the world – UX Collective

We have been writing, curating and sharing design-related content for the last 12 years. What started as a little side project has taken a scale that we could not have imagined when we were just starting out — even in our most ambitious dreams. Today, the UX Collective is the largest Medium publication about Design and UX, with more than 200k designers receiving our content every week, all over the world.

In the back of our heads, we have always wanted to do more. We’ve always been extremely critic with our own work, and with the type of content we (and other design publications) put out. In an era where the lines between community-generated content and content marketing are so blurred, we have seen the quality of online content about design plummet at unprecedented levels.

Every week, we receive a handful of emails from companies asking us to promote their services. “It’s a partnership”, they say, “and I’m sure your audience will benefit a lot from our services”. What they really mean is that they want to pay us to promote content we don’t necessarily believe in.

We say no every time.

Despite our efforts to keep our content as impartial as possible, we feel partially responsible for the less than inspiring quality of what the see online today — especially given the reach and influence we have. Personally, our frustration comes from the fact we, as designers, simply cannot find the type of content we would like to read online about design, with really rare exceptions.